Line item and Balance display in GL Master

To display accounting data we use two types of reporting i.e. balance display and line item display. It’s possible for those accounts which are selected as line item display while creating gl master record.

Balance display in sap will provide you an overview of the financial transaction of a gl account. From this you can only drill down to those line items which are taken to form the balance.

Where as, if your gl account has line item display marked in it’s master data then you can drill down from the balance of the account to the line items and then to the document level of a transaction. From these reports, you can have an overview of all those documents that are entered into sap. Even archived documents can also be displayed from this report.

GL account with line item display require more storage space and system time compare to a gl account which is maintained as balance display.

Line item display is maintained by selecting the option available in gl master. Not all gl accounts in sap can have line item display. Reconciliation accounts like customer reconciliation, vendor reconciliation should have balance display settings assigned to the gl master. The reason is, line items can be displayed customer or vendor wise from their respective sub ledgers so there is no requirement of having it again in general ledger accounting. You can only view balance items for these kinds of account. Based on this logic following gl accounts are also not required to have line item display;

Revenue account (transaction display managed from SD module)

Material Stock Account (transaction display managed from MM module)

Tax account (these are relevant with respect to the document so one can view these while viewing their respective documents)

If you have not selected line item display initially and want to select it after posting then you can do so by editing the gl master. However you can not have it for those financial transactions which are posted before such change.

We suggest you to decide such settings before creating gl accounts in sap. In actual implementation project, business owners and consultants always decide it before creating a gl account in sap.